In Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest's Fictional Road to
Rebellion, Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., examines the emergence of the
planter-aristocrat over the yeoman as the dominant cultural icon in
the newly settled states of the Old Southwest -- Kentucky,
Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas -- during
the first half of the nineteenth century. He related this region's
shift in cultural ideals, as reflected in its literature, both to
the coming of the Civil War and the failure of the postbellum South
to reintegrate itself fully into the nation.
In the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson's stalwart yeoman farmer was
the mythic figure that gave the most dynamic expression to and most
compelling justification for expansion to the west. This potent
symbol of rural democracy was enthusiastically embraced by settlers
in both midwestern and southern territories. By 1830, however,
residents of the new southern states had initiated a profound
imaginative movement away from the frontier myths that had linked
them with midwesterners. Faced with increasingly hostile attacks on
slavery and the plantation system, southerners from Virginia to
Louisiana united in defense of the plantation South. Watson shows
how writers of the Old Southwest reflected this cultural shift in
their tendency to idealize the planter and to subvert, subordinate,
or ignore the yeoman. Joining cultural and intellectual forces with
the more established plantation societies of the Eastern Seaboard,
these writers turned toward the Cavalier -- the noble, cultured
planter of aristocratic blood and manners who, like a father,
presided with wisdom and love over a large plantation -- as the
primary representative of the southern way of life.
Watson builds his argument by analyzing many different kinds of
writing. Choosing texts that shed light on the newly evolving
culture of the Old Southwest, Watson discusses the novelists
William Garrott Brown, James Lane Allen, Joseph Holt Ingraham,
Caroline Lee Hentz, and Augusta Jane Evans, historian Charles
Gayarre, humorists Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Thomas Bangs
Thorpe, New South propagandist Henry Grady, novelist and story
writer George Washington Cable, and poets Joseph Brennan and Sidney
Lanier.
The Cavalier ideal, Watson explains, unified the states of the
Confederacy and served as a kind if icon to be carried into battle.
After the war the figure was resurrected by southern writers and
made an integral part of the region's Lost Cause myth, which
northerners helped perpetuate. The Cavalier figure has continued to
lead a vigorous life into the present century, as attested by
novels such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Stark
Young's So Red the Rose, and even William Faulkner's Absalom,
Absalom
Yeoman Versus Cavalier is a solid and entertainingly written
analysis of how the Cavalier, as the South's unifying mythical
figure, helped shape southern history and the creation of the
legend of the Old South following the Civil War. It contributes
greatly to our understanding of the antebellum South and
demonstrates how studying a work of literature can lead to a fuller
comprehension of the culture that produced it.
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